The Man Who Wished

by Achmed Abdullah

 

The Man Who Wished

byAchmed Abdullah
Author of “The Infidel”, “The Flowering Stone” etc.

HE opened the cablegram which the club steward had brought, and read the curt, sad message. Then that happened of which he was afraid: not a sensation of some sort, not a physical wrench, a moment of grief or emotion, but a lack of sensation, an utter absence of grief.

He lit a cigar with strong, steady fingers. He thought. It was as it had always been. The consciousness of his own character glared in upon him, direct from the inner fact of things.

He read the cablegram over again, thinking and wishing as he thought that there might be something in the cabled message which would touch the chord of feeling which he craved subconsciously, and make it vibrate.

But he could not find it in his heart. It was not there, he decided; that was all. He missed the quality of the sublime; the quality which gilds even sorrow and lights up resignation.

He read again:

Mother died last night

... and then his father’s name, and the address of the far home in the North of Scotland.

So she was dead, the old woman. (He knocked the ash from his cigar carefully, staring at the red-glowing end.) And he was sure that he had loved her. But to-day the message of her death, shot across on that copper wire at the bottom of the ocean, spelled only a fact to him, gray and stark and sharply silhouetted, but a fact like many others, like a rise or fall in N.P. shares, or the arrival of an extra-large consignment of Kermanshah rugs at his warehouse in lower Fifth Avenue. Just a concise fact; and there was no grief, no wrenching, twisting sorrow to go with it.

He cupped his smooth-shaven, bony chin in his hands, caressing it with a mechanical gesture. Then he turned a little in the comfortable armchair and called the steward.

“See if my car is down below.”

A moment later the servant was back at his elbow.

“Yes, Mr. Macdannald. The machine is there.”

“Very well.”

He rose and walked as far as the door. Then he returned to the table. He had forgotten the cablegram. He picked it up, and stood there for a moment, weighing it in his hand. Then he tore it into small fragments with a jerky motion of his hairy, capable fingers. He frowned. Why keep the lifeless message?

He walked slowly downstairs, out into the street, and entered the low-slung, iron-gray motor-car.

“Back to the office, Spencer. Wait ... first to the nearest cable office.”

The car purred softly through the rain-mirrored streets and stopped two minutes later at a telegraph station. James Macdannald entered it, thinking out the wording of his message as he walked up to the desk. He wrote it and passed it to the clerk.

Deeply grieved, letter follows.

James.

He walked back to the car and settled into the black leather seat. “Gad,” he thought to himself,“it’s a lie that I sent home, a damned lie; for there is no grief.” He only understood that his mother was dead; just the fact. And he wondered in a vague way.

He considered that he had loved her once, that there had always been perfect accord and friendship between them, that he had always thought that he loved her. He remembered the long, sweet evenings at home in Scotland, in their old, gray stone cottage near the North Sea—the fog, the thick, clogging foul weather, the spray and the salt tang from the sea, and the gold-glowing coals in the hearth. And himself at his mother’s knee, with her curly red hair touching his sleek, black head as she bent over him; and she whispering tales of the Highlands of old, swinging tales of other years, tales of their race and of their race’s pride—bitter, gory tales, some clanking and deep-toned with the harsh steel of heroism, others surcharged with the emotion and the eternal mystery which is the North.

And now the memory was bitter and strange to him, and scented with the dead-sweet perfume of withered violets. But there was no grief, no change in his life. Of that he was certain.

It was just as on that day, a few years back, when his brother, Stuart, had died—and then, in the same year, Mordant Robson, his boyhood chum, killed by a Boer bullet. They had passed into the dark, and they had left no shadows on his soul. Yet he had liked them, loved them.

The car stopped at the entrance of the building on lower Fifth Avenue. He looked up at the big, solid, black-and-gold sign which bore his name and that of his partner:

Macdannald and Haddad
Oriental Rugs.

He looked up at it, touching his hat. It was a daily rite with him.

There it was. It marked an epoch in American trade. It meant achievement and wealth, and that broad, unquestioned, square-standing credit which is more than wealth. And he had made it, built it, bricked it together—he and his Syrian partner.

Twenty years before, he had left Scotland. He remembered the old Allan liner out of Glasgow, the Moravian, and his mother there at the gangplank, standing in the drizzling rain. He remembered her homely Scots advice as she kissed him for the last time.

“You are going to a grand land, Jamie-lad. But do not let them beat ye. You are a Scot and a Macdannald—a black Macdannald, mind ye—and I know ye will not fail.”

And now the old woman was dead, and he had not failed. He had succeeded. Self-helping and straight he had gone ahead. No speculation, no swinging along on mad booms, on watered optimism of the unborn future; but hard work mating harder brains—and ever Success as his motto, until it had become his very soul, and more than his soul—a covering for himself, a cloak and boots of his own clouting.

Then he had met Nadj Haddad, the Syrian, and they had joined forces, wealth, experience, and genius. It was just another chapter of American business success, American, though the first and last chapter of it was written by a Scot and edited by a Syrian. But it was American just the same, because the land itself had made it possible; no other land could. And so it blazed its message and its sterling hallmark on that solid, square shield:

Macdannald and Haddad
Oriental Rugs.

His partner was in the office. He was a slight, tall man, with keen, brown eyes, and a smile which was rarely absent from his full lips.

“Hello there, Mac.”

“Hello ...” then in a lifeless manner, “my mother died suddenly.”

Haddad looked up with quick, deep sympathy.

“You can make the Cunarder, old man. She sails at six. I’ll telephone to the office and get you your stateroom.”

“No, no. Never mind.” He took off his coat and hat. “Have those Daghestans come in, that consignment of Ullah Khan’s?”

“Yes. I looked them over. We bought well, very well. There are some perfect gems in the collection.” He stopped, then continued in a lower voice. “Look here, old man, I can attend to all the business. You go and catch that boat.”

Macdannald looked up with a frown, his fingers drumming on the desk.

“Never mind, never mind. I'll stay right in town.”

And they talked business.

Haddad looked up once or twice during their talk, with an earnest, searching mien. Finally he put down the bill of lading which they were studying together.

“Look here, Mac., old man. You’re as nervous as a cat. Of course I know—I understand—your mother’s death——”

Macdannald, solemn and gray-visaged, looked at his partner.

“No, no. It isn’t that—not at all. It’s just the contrary. It’s just because I cannot—because I cannot——”

He broke off suddenly. Why, the other wouldn’t understand what he was driving at. Then he continued in a louder voice, stretching out both his hands for the other’s inspection.

“No, I’m not nervous. See here, Haddad. Watch my hands. Perfectly quiet—as steady as rocks, what? No, it isn’t nerves.”

They worked for another ten minutes. Then, suddenly, Macdannald rose with a jerky movement of his lips. His lips quivered, but his voice was as low and quiet as ever.

“Haddad, do you know what I’ve just been thinking?”

“No, old man.”

“It’s this.” He laughed grimly. “Here we’ve known each other for nearly twenty years, you and I, haven’t we? We've worked together for over twelve. And yet—why damn it, man—we don’t know each other.” His voice broke and quavered a little, just a very little. “And to-day—just now—right this very minute—I was wishing we did know each other outside of rugs, and bills of lading, and bank accounts, and occasional dinners at your house. I should like to talk to you.”

There was a deep, kind light in Haddad’s eyes. He reached out an impulsive hand, gripping the other’s shoulder.

“Mac., we’ve been in this country a long time. Often I feel as if I’d been born over here. We'd pass anywhere for plain American business men, I guess. Successful? yes, very much so. But the heart of you is Scotch, and the heart of me is still of the Orient. And so you are still—let’s say—reserved, diffident, self-hurting; and in my heart there is still the sun-gold of the East and the deep well of sympathy which goes with it.” He smiled softly. “I guess you can tell me, my friend.”

The Scotchman looked at the ground, his eyes tracing the intricate pattern of the rug. He was hunting for words. Then he spoke.

“This business of ours. What does it mean to you? What does it mean to you, outside of money and clothes and motor-cars?”

“I don’t get you.”

“I mean, is it worth it? Is it worth my——” He stopped short, thought for a moment, then continued quickly, excitedly. “We've built it, with energy, with a certain savage sincerity. It’s part of ourselves—an articulation of our souls if you wish. We have had ideas, big ideas, bigger than the other fellows’, and we—we—we bodied them—yes, that’s the word—we bodied them forth in all this.” And he pointed at the office, and through the glass partition at the huge showroom where Persian and Anatolian rugs were piled six feet high along the walls.

He paced up and down. Then he stopped in front of his partner.

“You see what I mean, don’t you? All this is an embodiment of ourselves, bursting with the strength and the energy that is in us. We have given to it, to its making, our best, our very best. But what does it all mean? What does it signify? Is it happiness? Can it make us laugh?” His voice rose to a high pitch. “Can it make us good or bad? Good God, can it make us cry? That’s it. Tell me—can it make us cry?”

The Syrian looked perturbed, anxious, embarrassed.

“Mac.—Mac., old man——”

The other stopped him with a gesture.

“Answer me another question, and forgive me for asking it. That time when your little daughter died, little Kadijah, three years ago—did you cry then? Were you overcome with grief? Did you feel sorrow—I mean real, deep sorrow—not the sorrow which expresses itself in wearing a crêpe band round your arm and in avoiding the theaters and the restaurants—but the real, real, real sorrow?” His words came chokingly, quick, staccato.

“Why—of course—what a question, Macdannald. You must know. I beg your pardon, but your mother—your own mother—she died to-day. You must know—you——”

He was going to say more. But the other picked up coat and hat, and walked to the door. There he turned.

“Thanks, Haddad. I got the answer to my question.”

And he was gone.

IT was fully an hour later, and Hamilton, the famous nerve specialist, was talking to James Macdannald.

Macdannald shook his head.

“No, no, no, doctor. You misunderstand me. You misunderstand me completely. I am not an amateur searching for a new philosophical truth. I am not toying or coquetting with my emotions. I am in deadly earnest.”

The great doctor studied the man in front of him. A man of concrete and steel, he thought to himself, without nerves, without physical or mental ailment. And he had just told him as strange a story as he had ever heard in a long, arduous medical career. Why, it was ridiculous, preposterous, incredible. Here was a successful business man, in the prime of life and glowing with health—and he wanted a treatment to make him feel and understand the common emotions of happiness and unhappiness, of joy and grief, which are at the cradle of the human heart, of Creation itself.

He caressed his silky, white beard. Then he tapped his would-be patient on the knee.

“You've come to me with a philosophical complaint, my dear sir, and I can either give you a philosophical medicine or a bit of trite, childish, and very ancient advice. Which shall it be?”

“Let’s hear the philosophical.”

The doctor laughed softly, quietly.

“Scotch, eh?... Belong to a nation which makes a hangman’s supper of whiskey and turns a declaration of love into a theological discussion. All right. Here it is then.” He spoke slowly, carefully. “Take all this world of ours, the cosmos of which you are a particle, a breathing, infinitesimal, quasi-independent cell. Take all this solid-looking, materialistic globe, and consider that, at rock-bottom, in very deed, it is less than nothing, and that therefore you, yourself, are still less than less than nothing, and then stop worrying about a thing which is as small and unimportant as all that.”

The doctor smiled, but there was no answering smile in Macdannald’s grim eyes. He shook his head.

“I told you, doctor, that I am in deadly earnest.”

“So you did, and I believe you. And so I shall give you the other advice—the trite, childish, ancient one. Will you promise to follow it?”

“Yes. I promise.” He leaned forward eagerly.

“You have been making a Roman holiday of your soul. Now you must give a plain American holiday to your body. Pack your trunks to-night and take the first train—let’s see, where to?—this is January. Good. You take the first train to Palm Beach, and you stay there until you own up to yourself that the cure is completed.”

“Ridiculous! I do not need a trip for my health.”

Hamilton rose, watch in hand.

“Remember, you promised. There are other patients waiting. I'll send you my bill when you are well. Good afternoon.”

He walked with Macdannald toward the outer door. There he shook hands and smiled.

“I wonder where I read it—I guess it must have been in the Bible—I am positive it wasn’t in the Lancet, and I never read anything but those two books—but here’s what I read, and I’ll quote it for your benefit: ‘Take a wife unto thyself of the tribe of’—never mind the tribe. You'll find lots of pretty girls down at Palm Beach at this time of the year.”

Macdannald gave a half-articulate reply, grim, trenchant, savage. Then he went home and packed his trunks.

FOUR months had passed, and he was still lingering in the South.

He was sitting in an easy chair on the veranda of his hotel, looking at the delicate tracery of the trees, shot through with flowering red and orange. There was glad humming in the air, of birds and gauze-winged insects, drunk with sun-gold.

He looked at the girl in the chair next to him. He thought of the weeks that had passed, the meeting, the sudden friendship, the ripe fruit of it. For he loved her, and he had told her so, every day, straight out, with Scottish directness. Her reply was always evasive, a golden laugh with a mournful note trembling at the end of it, like a little bel-canto sob. It worried him, that note. He did not understand it. Something tugged at his heart-strings when he heard it. And the thought came to him, inarticulate, unfathomable, like an eerie Highland lament, a something which leads the soul to the edge of the infinite, and then forbids it to gaze.

He looked at her, sharply, searchingly, and then he wondered and then thought again. Why, she was not beautiful. It was not a handsome nor a pretty face, with its thin outline, its slow, silent eyes, and the lips curling a little in disdain, as of one fighting an unsurrendering battle. But somehow it reminded him of the pale glory of a late-blooming Dijon rose. Somehow it was most dear to him, incommensurable with all the other faces he had ever seen. It came to him at times with a jarring shock that this woman was dearer to him than that far, incomparable, monstrous God of the Old Testament in whom he believed with a heavy, shivering faith; for he had that quality of religiosity which is peculiar to Jews and Scotsmen. To him, in the girl’s face, something was revealed as the white and precious Grail man lives for—and dies for.

She turned to him with a smile. It was as if she were answering the unspoken question of both their hearts; that they might know, and voice their knowledge, and choke the hurting, unworded thought.

“No, no, James. It is impossible.”

“Yes. Because you do not love me. You don’t, do you?”

And again she laughed that golden laugh with the mournful note in it.

“Will you answer me a question, James, even if it should hurt you?”

“Yes.”

“Then tell me what marriage means to you—love—what does it signify to you?”

“It means a fulfilment, a revealing. It means the never-ending unveiling of a sacred mystery——”

The girl laughed again. But this time it was a frank, delighted laugh.

“Oh James, who would ever listen to you talk, and believe that you are an up-to-date, successful American business man? Why, you talk like a poet. And you aren’t even right.”

“Tell me then. What is love to you?”

“Oh—just a very inert, trite, commonplace thing—as if some wooden-handed upholsterer had put it together with rivets and glue.”

She saw the deepening pain in the man’s eyes, and so she continued quickly.

“No, no, no. I didn’t mean it, not a word of it.”

He took her hand in his, and she did not draw it away.

“Then tell me, what is it?”

“It is companionship, James, and never-ending mutual trust—a merging of every interest and every thought—and then——” She hesitated, but only for a second. “To me it means utter possession of the man I love. We have been such very good friends these last few months, and so you know all about me. I told you that I’ve been ailing since I was a small child, and so I am spoilt, pampered, selfish—unreasonable if you will. You know that I must live here——” She laughed. “I am not going to die, not for a good many years, my dear. But to live, in health and in the peace which health brings, I must live here, here—where it is warm and soft, where the sun cries out to field and beach. No New York, no Boston, no sea voyage to Europe—always the warm lands, and the indolence which goes with them. That is my life. That must be my life. Every doctor tells me so. And so my life is centered here. And the man I love, the man I marry, he must follow me here, and he must never go from my side. He must live here; and, more than that, he must have his interests here, his deepest thoughts, his secret endeavors. And he needn’t try to make believe, for I would feel it; and then I would be unhappy—and horribly, horribly disagreeable.” She stopped, then she returned to her first thought. “Yes, such is love to me. Utter merging and mating. It would be a failure for me to love at all, if I loved otherwise.”

Macdannald’s fingers closed tightly over hers. His voice was harsh, rasping.

“You have said too much, or else not enough.”

The girl smiled, just a little petulantly.

“Why no, James, dear. I love you. You must know that. It is true I never told you so. But you can feel it, can’t you? But then I shan’t marry you. You belong up there, the North, New York, where you have made your success. And my life is this, is here, in the blue-and-gold lands.”

Macdannald spoke quickly. He did not want to think, knowing that thinking might alter the impulse of his answer.

“Haddad will buy me out at my own figure. I shall marry you, and live down here, be with you always. My thoughts shall be here. There will be no need for make-believe. I shall marry you and live down here with you. I shall center myself around this land. I would wish nothing else, beloved, think of nothing else.”

“For a month, a year—perhaps two. And then you will be wishing for the North again, and the business of men—your own business—your own success as you made it, as you understand it—as you will miss and regret it the rest of your life.”

Macdannald thought for a long time. He studied the long, nervous hands of the girl, with the high blue veins of a thoroughbred; and he knew that the girl was right, and that she would demand his last thought and feeling, even the last particle of his ambition. But he knew that he loved her. He felt a little cutting pain, a sudden contracting of his heart muscle; and somehow, he did not know why, the words of the cablegram came back to him, the cablegram which had told him of his mother’s death. He had not felt pain then. Now, at the moment of his desire’s fulfilment, he felt that wrench which he knew belonged to grief.

He spoke slowly, with an even voice.

“You have read me, dear, but you have read me wrong. You think I have given my life and strength to the business which I created in New York, Haddad and I—to the many little details which, bricked together, spell success. So you read me, and you have read me wrong. Big success, my dear, is not a single, grim, continuous sacrifice to the sharp little gods of fine, searching detail. Take my own business. The Persian artist who can merely sit on a stool and weave those silken, flowered dreams of his into rugs, would never make a salesman, nor the salesman a manager; never. In such a one there must be the artist, the dreamer, the doer, and the organizer—all of them, in one or more degrees of strength. He is in all of these. He is of all of these. Rugs? Only an accident. I made a success of them, I know. I shall sell out to-morrow, and settle here, center everything here, and make a success here—and happiness and contentment for you and me. Remember what I said, that the successful man must be a doer as well as a dreamer. Now, here—with you —I shall give the dreamer in me a chance.” He spoke in a lower voice, as if half to himself. “I shall have you. No, no—I shall not miss the North.”

SO he married her.

He knew that he had lied to her. He knew that all his life he would regret that career which he had given up, the success up North, the square, black-and-gold sign on lower Fifth Avenue, the barter and trade, the big money and bigger credit. But he knew that she would never see it, that she would never read the last page of his heart. He would keep his promise.

And the thought of it came like a pain to him, a sharp, cutting pain.

Here, in his hour of greatest happiness, he felt that twisting, hurting sensation which he had craved in his hours of sorrow and bereavement, and craved in vain.

But he did not mind it. For suddenly he understood that, just as joy, to be joy, must have the element of naïve self-consciousness, so happiness, to be happiness, must have pain to keep it awake.

He was listening to the oldest choral melody in the hearts of men.

And, for want of a better word, we have called that melody Love.